


Here they have been from their childhood

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Canon Locations: The Cave. Summary: A viewer of the 74th Hunger Games gives credit where it's due.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here they have been from their childhood

Their cave gets morning sunlight, and the Gamemakers have positioned additional cameras during the days that they've been there, so there's a very good view throughout the morning of the two of them next to each other. Peeta still unconscious in the sleeping bag, one pale arm out in the open air with a little drop of blood that wells up, slows to a halt, darkens into a scab. Katniss collapsed onto her face, legs tangled and hands under her head, with a dark puddle that just keeps spreading out from her hair. You can tell the entrance to the cave is downhill from where they're lying because the blood goes in that direction. After about ten minutes the Gamemakers posted to the screen two side-by-side graphs of their heart rates and imputed body temperatures.

They watch in shifts all day, sometimes sitting there together, sometimes taking turns pretending to do some mindless task in another corner of the room, never lingering when it's time to get lunch or use the bathroom. School is cancelled (has been for a couple days now). Nobody drops by unless they already live close by, and they don't really talk, just watch the screen together for a little while until they're on their way. 

The Gamemakers do split the screen so that there's something to watch other than what might as well be a photograph. The boy from Two, who doesn't have his feast backpack, is desperately trying to figure out something to eat. The boy from Eleven and the girl from Five carefully inspect the contents of their backpacks — he has food and an armored body suit, though it was hard to see what came from which backpack, and she has an assortment of weapons. They seem to lay in some plans. But no one goes on the hunt today.

The temperature in the arena must go up, as it has on other days. Peeta moves, finally, to push the sleeping bag half off him, and the little graph shows his temperature start returning to normal. He doesn't wake up, though. Katniss never moves. She's wrapped in two jackets, so you'd think her temperature would increase, but it doesn't; in the late afternoon, it ticks slowly downward with the sun.

Somehow it takes a moment to notice that Peeta has opened his eyes. He blinks and looks up at the ceiling of the cave, his gaze almost but not quite aligned with a camera so that the effect is actually a little creepy. His face is completely blank.

Everybody in Panem is probably pinned to their screens right now or rushing to get there.

After a minute Peeta licks his lips and turns a little toward a ray of afternoon sunlight getting in at the back of the cave — away from Katniss. He looks blankly off in that direction for awhile. 

“Turn around, you goofball!” somebody shrieks next door.

He looks a little more collected by the time he does turn. He looks at Katniss's silhouette and seems to relax, as if recognizing something at last. Then you can kind of see his gaze halt in the vicinity of her head. His eyes widen.

He sits up, reaching for her, and sways and lands back on an elbow. Too fast. He reaches for her again and hesitates and puts a hand on her neck. Hard to tell if he's looking for a pulse or not. But her skin must still be warm. He trembles. He unclasps her quiver and pulls it away from her body. He takes her right wrist and gently straightens out her arm over her head so he can roll her onto her back.

He recoils a little, and you can't really blame him. Her face is coated in blood and her hands are gummy with it, so much so that her left hand sticks to her forehead for a moment before falling away. She's as limp as a piece of laundry.

He finds a pulse properly this time. The two graphs are still on the bottom of the screen, so you can see that his heart is pounding, and you know what he's learning. 

When he's done with her pulse and with holding a hand under her nose to see about her breathing, he sort of hovers his hands as if he can't figure out what to do. It's startling when he starts cussing, not that it's loud at all but it seems out of character, a steady stream of anger that, after a minute, seems to be directed at Katniss for being an idiot as much as it's directed anywhere at all.

Supposedly, in early years, the Gamemakers would try to edit out cussing on the way to the broadcast, but it's hard to imagine. Given everything else that goes on, cussing would be a bizarre thing to be delicate about. 

He notices the syringe and the tiny backpack between their bodies, sees the puncture mark on his arm and the fact that there's nothing left in the syringe, and puts the needle back in its box out of harm's way. He picks up the medicine kit from where she left it next to him and falls silent as he starts going through it. It's hard to tell what he's looking for. After a moment he puts it down, shakes his head a couple times, and then sees the bottles of water. He drinks thirstily. It must clear his mind a little. He pushes away the sleeping bag, spares a glance at the state of his leg, and then swings himself around to sit next to her. He does this by balancing on his hands and pulling his bad leg along using the good one in a wrestling-looking move. He scoots her around a little so that her head is downhill. Then he pours a little water on her face, waits for the blood to thin out a bit, and begins using his hand and a thin stream of water to gently wipe her face clean. 

They find a camera angle to show his face as he does this, and his expression seems all wrong for a boy of sixteen, too old and too complicated.

She never flinches or moves at all, and before long he has found the knife cuts. He's obviously relieved there aren't more of them. The big one is oozing. He rinses off his hands with the last of that bottle of water and goes back to the medicine kit. It's almost a do-over of her frustration as she tried to figure out how to treat him by the stream two days ago, and he probably doesn't remember that process clearly. He starts cussing under his breath again. He pokes through the entire backpack, and then looks at her and says, “You used leaves. You have got to be kidding me.” It looks like he's settled on the burn ointment as better than nothing when the last ray of sunlight disappears.

This rattles him. Maybe he hadn't understood that between the sleep syrup and the medicine he was out for a whole day. He grabs for the flashlight and then looks from the front to the back of the cave, clearly recognizing that the light will be visible from the exterior, if not now then before long.

He should probably eat something before he loses his wits completely, but he just sort of put the food aside when he came across it. He must still be sick. He hasn't tried to move his leg much.

He does open up one of the other water bottles and drink. Then he looks at it really hard. What could be wrong with it? He takes another sip. Thinking. Smells the water. Then he looks through the backpack again.

When he comes up with the little bottle of iodine, and takes the cap off and finds the same smell, Prim screeches, “Yes!”

Her mother startles and stares at her. Prim doesn't care. She dances around her chair. She's not going to get in the habit of cheering while watching the Hunger Games. But when-if-when Katniss gets home, Prim is going to have to ask her exactly what she thinks iodine does to water if not disinfect it. Peeta may have been too far gone to benefit from it when Katniss found him. But still.

On the screen, Peeta wonders about dosage or something for a moment and then shrugs and lets a row of drops fall directly onto the cut on Katniss's forehead. He puts his finger over her mouth to keep another few drops from rolling in there instead of sinking into the cut on her lip. Then he gets out the gauze and tapes a few layers over her forehead.

He scoots up next to her shoulder and turns on the flashlight to try to look at the rest of her head, but given how wet and dirty her hair is, it seems fruitless. He doesn't waste much time on it. He clicks the flashlight back off and scoots back and unzips her jacket — then says out loud, “Hey, this is my jacket,” prompting some laughter from next door — then the second jacket. He looks at the blood staining her side and peers at her shoulder around the collar of her shirt and then clearly feels there's no help for it but to start peeling the outer layers off her. 

Prim's mother shifts uncomfortably, and Prim feels a little surprised, since she's never cared when any of the other tributes are undressed, even when Katniss had all of Peeta's clothes off, or when Katniss had a bath early on. Prim watches as Peeta unbuttons her sister's shirt and tugs it off her right side, the bloody side, then puts his arm under her head like she's a baby and lifts her up against his chest. He keeps her propped there and works her arm down into her undershirt sleeve and pulls the fabric up so he can see her body. She has on the same sort of sturdy bra that they always seem to have for the girl tributes, and it has hardly any blood on it. There's blood on her skin but it's pretty obviously just run down from her head wound. Prim can see some bruises but nothing patently serious. She turns her attention to Peeta. He looks Katniss over carefully, but doesn't seem inappropriate about it. His hands stay on her arm or ribs and are gentle. His expression is hard to read in the fading light. In a moment he finds the hem of her undershirt and pulls it back down and gets her arm back through. He puts the long-sleeved shirt back on her too, though it's clearly challenging to get a shirt onto an unconscious person. 

Prim decides she's willing to trust this boy with her sister. He treats her respectfully and he's funny and he's smart enough to figure out the iodine.

Peeta must have noticed that Katniss is cold, because he puts her back in her jacket (but reclaims his own) and puts her hood up and then gets her into the sleeping bag. While he's doing that he figures out part of why she's cold, because he exclaims in surprise when he goes to move her feet, then leaves her boots hanging out the gash in bottom of the bag and clicks the flashlight back on to undo the laces. He wrings out her socks and drapes them over the boot tops. He drinks more water and tries to give her some, but she doesn't seem to swallow. Then he leans back against the cave wall and slides the sleeping bag with her in it toward him and sticks her wrinkly bare feet under his shirt, cradled against his stomach. He drags the backpack to him too and finds the night-vision glasses and puts them on, though it seems optimistic to think of staying up all night. Clouds are rolling across the arena's sky and there is no moonlight. He finds her knife and lays it close by.

The night cameras have been on for a long time and her body temperature has come up just a bit by the time he gives up on the watch and crawls into the sleeping bag beside her. Prim curls up in a blanket on the floor by the screen and sleeps too.


End file.
